Klaus Fuchs makes solely a cameo look on this story. However as a result of he is much better identified than Jürgen Kuczynski, his relationship to the latter helps set up the milieu wherein our fundamental character operated.
Fuchs is routinely referred to pejoratively as a “spy” who “stole” atomic secrets and techniques. A extra nuanced view of his actions was supplied by Sir Dick Goldsmith White, Director Basic of MI5 from 1953 to 1956, and Head of MI6 from 1956 to 1968: “He was a scientist who received cross on the Anglo-American ploy in withholding very important info from an ally preventing a standard enemy.”
In 1942, Fuchs met with Jürgen Kuczynski, who was then instructing on the London Faculty of Economics. Kuczynski launched him to the Soviet agent, Simon Kremer (codename: “Alexander”). After assembly with Kremer a number of instances, Fuchs’s middleman was modified to Jürgen’s sister, Ursula (codename: “Sonya”), so Fuchs would not must journey to London at hand over info. Biographies of each Klaus Fuchs and Ursula Kuczynski had been revealed in 2020: Atomic Spy: The Darkish Lives of Klaus Fuchs by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan and Agent Sonya: Lover, Mom, Soldier, Spy by Ben MacIntyre.
Though not as cinematic as his sister’s or Fuchs’s careers, Jürgen Kuczynski had his personal moments of transnational intrigue, starting within the mid Twenties with a stint as director of the American Federation of Labor’s newly established statistical division. Throughout his time with the AFL, Kuczynski developed new relative wage statistics and suggested AFL president William Inexperienced on what Inexperienced proclaimed as Fashionable Wage Coverage. In Labor Statistics and Class Wrestle, Marc Linder described Kuczynski’s contribution to AFL wage coverage, characterizing him as “President Inexperienced’s Marxist Ventriloquist.” Extra on Kuczynski’s eight-year sojourn in England may be present in “Jürgen Kuczynski: A German-Jewish Marxist Scholar in Exile” by Axel Honest-Schulz in German Students in Exile.
Kuczynski was a prolific author, publishing over 4,000 articles and books throughout his profession. In 1980, he wrote a chunk for the Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte titled, “Das Verhältnis von Arbeit und Freizeit: Überlegungen zur Entwicklung vormarxscher Vorstellungen” (“The connection between work and leisure: Reflections on the event of pre-Marxist concepts”). The final 4 and a half pages of the article consists primarily of lengthy quotations from William Godwin and Karl Marx, interspersed with transient commentary, at a ratio of three:1. Kuczynski’s argument will not be significantly unique and, in actual fact, he credit Max Beer’s Geschichte des Sozialismus in England (1913) for any unique insights.
Like Kuczynski and Fuchs, Max Beer was a German émigré who was declared an enemy alien in England when warfare broke out between the 2 nations. In Beer’s case, nonetheless, it was the First World Conflict and he, a Jew, was safely deported again to Germany for the length. After the warfare, he returned to England and revealed the drastically expanded Historical past of British Socialism.
Unintentionally, Kucyzinski’s gloss on Beer’s interpretation reveals a delicate however vital distinction between the German and English variations. Within the English model, Beer drastically expanded his dialogue of The Supply and Treatment of the Nationwide Difficulties, from barely lower than a web page to 6 full pages. However the German model contained a footnote in its part on William Godwin that was not replicated within the English model. Translated, that footnote learn, “This sentence was later utilized by the pamphleteer. See Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Worth. III. 303.” The sentence in query was, roughly, “the true wealth of man is leisure.”
Within the English model, Beer paraphrased Godwin’s assertion as “Actual wealth was leisure.” The pamphleteer’s “stunning” assertion, “Wealth is disposable time, and nothing extra” seems 128 pages later with no commentary linking it again to Godwin’s concept or ahead to Marx’s appreciation.
In fact, Beer’s footnote was extremely opaque until one had a replica of Theories of Surplus Worth readily available to elucidate who “Pamphletisten” referred to. Kuczynski’s gloss on Beer’s cryptic footnote was, I imagine, right:
Industrious leisure as wealth is certainly an exquisite concept that has been achieved by the [imaginative] flights of humanity into the longer term, an concept that Marx additionally fortunately adopted as an inheritance from the previous.
Circuitously from Godwin, nonetheless, however from an nameless pamphleteer who wrote a technology later and who, as Beer rightly suspects, adopted the thought of leisure because the wealth of the nation from Godwin.
I believe (that ol’ hermeneutics of suspicion) that each Beer and Kuczynski had been avoiding one thing, most likely unconsciously, that may be unflattering to Karl Marx. For Beer, the clues are extra specific. As a substitute of increasing on an concept hinted at in a footnote, he eradicated it. For Kuczynski, Marx’s “completely happy adoption” of the “fantastic concept” as “an inheritance from the previous” elides the uncomfortable conclusion that Marx credited the pamphlet’s “wealth is disposable time” nowhere in his revealed work however effusively in his unpublished writings.
I do not imply this as crying foul. Marx made an analytical contribution that far surpassed Godwin’s and Dilke’s boldly-stated convictions. The requirements for crediting sources usually are not written in stone. And, presumably, Marx totally meant to publish Theories of Surplus Worth, which contained an intensive overview of the pamphlet. He simply by no means received round to ending it.
The spectre of “plagiarism” haunts Marx’s appropriation of the concept that wealth is disposable time for a number of causes. First, Friedrich Engels introduced up the matter of the pamphlet that “Marx saved from falling into oblivion” within the context of refuting accusations of plagiarism from Karl Rodbertus and his acolyte. Later, together with Karl Kautsky, Engels once more refuted Anton Menger’s prices that Marx was intentionally poor in citing his sources. Oddly sufficient, Engels and Kautsky ignored Menger’s disparagement of Engels’s earlier declare that Marx’s views on surplus worth had been influenced by the pamphlet “which,” in accordance with Menger, “accommodates solely faint hints of the idea.”
Beer was ambivalent about Herbert Foxwell’s introduction to Menger’s ebook. In 1913, he wrote, “Because of the creator’s passionate anti-Marxianism, I used to be thrown right into a polemical temper in the course of the lecture, which appeared to me to be a poor preparation for scientific analysis. I subsequently quickly put the ebook down…” Six years later, he referred to Foxwell’s introduction as the one “sufficient exposition” of the writings of Grey, Thompson, Hodgskin, and Bray, whose works had been “virtually unattainable.” Beer had little else to say about Menger’s The Proper to the Complete Produce of Labour aside from to complain that Menger unfold the exaggerated view of William Thompson’s significance he acquired from Adolf Held’s Zwei Bucher Zur Socialen Geschichte Englands.
Giancarlo de Vivo stated again in 2019 that The Supply and Treatment “has not acquired the eye it deserves” contemplating Marx’s personal claims. Having immersed myself in Marx’s appropriation and elaboration on the pamphlet’s themes, I might put the case a lot stronger. Shut consideration to the pamphlet’s affect on Marx basically transforms what we all know concerning the improvement of Marx’s thought and what he meant by the contradiction between the forces and relations of manufacturing.